“Alright, alright.”
He waved his fingers at me, flicking me away, and his partner, Alison Greene, gave me an apologetic look. I shook my head and walked away, thinking how glad I was to have Stephen as my partner and not a man like Sedgwick. To be fair, he gave the impression of getting on well enough with Greene, who seemed to be one of the only ones who could argue with him and actually change his opinion.
Stephen was standing up at his desk when I returned, and I sent him a hopeful look.
“There’s news?”
“Good and bad. Two teens did come to pick up the patches, but they’re young, low down in the hierarchy.”
“Darn.” I made a noise of frustration in my throat.
“The officers there picked them up regardless, in case we wanted to talk to them.”
“Hopefully, they’ll have something for us.” I sighed. “It’d be good to get a look at the patches, at least.”
“They’re bringing the teens back here. It shouldn’t be long,” Stephen told me.
“Maybe I should’ve told them to leave the kids if it was just younger ones,” I wondered aloud as I flopped down into my seat, and Stephen sat down beside me.
“Why?”
“The group’s going to know that we’re aware of the patches and tracking them now. They won’t use that route again, so we’re left high and dry. And what do we get? A couple of lackeys who probably won’t know any more than Mickey, or even less.”
“That’s assuming the kids report back, right?” Stephen countered. “Maybe we can get them on our side and send them back with the patches, the gang none the wiser.”
“Maybe, but it’s a risk. What if someone was watching what happened? The teens could be in danger if we send them back to spy for us. I don’t want to put that burden on a child.”
“You were fine doing it with Mickey,” Stephen challenged.
I shot him a stony look. “That was different. Mickey’s a bit older, and we brought him in to talk to us from his home. It’s unlikely anyone watched that, right?”
“But we first talked to him after he and Tiger were caught at the barn fire-”
“Exactly,” I said stubbornly. “That was him and Tiger. The teens aren’t going to get suspicious of kids that get caught by us. That’s part of the risk they’re taking with the crimes they’re committing, right? But I reckon they’d get suspicious if we sent those two kids back with the patches, ‘cus we wouldn’t do that unless they were working with us, would we?”
“So we don’t send them back with the patches,” he said with a shrug.
I sighed. “Look, you have a point, but I’ll admit that it was a risk with Mickey, okay? And I don’t want to put any other kids through that, especially young ones.” I glanced at my watch and felt my stomach tighten. “Which reminds me, Mickey’s mum never called me back to say that he was home yesterday.”
“She would’ve called if he hadn’t, though, wouldn’t she?” Stephen’s eyes were widened in alarm.
“I hope so.”
I had my phone in hand and rang Mickey’s house phone, tapping my fingers against the desk impatiently as I waited for a response. Another missing kid was the very last thing we needed, and I wouldn’t be able to help feeling guilty if that kid was Mickey. It was Stephen and me who convinced the teen to talk to us and if some harm had come to him because of it-
“Hello?”
“DCI Mitchell speaking,” I said in a rush. “Is Mickey home?”
“Oh,” his mum exhaled in a rush. “I’m so sorry I didn’t call. He came back late last night, yes. He’s fine.” She gave an apologetic little laugh, and I released a breath of relief. “He won’t speak to me except in grunts, and he’s sulking in his room, but he’s home now.”
“Do you think he’d talk to me?”
“Probably not,” she said after a pause. “He’s pretty mardy today. I doubt you’ll be able to get anything useful out of him.”
“Okay, no worries. Thanks for telling me, Ms White.”
I hung up, and Stephen read from my expression that Mickey was home and well, at least for now.
A moment later, the phone rang to let us know that the two teenagers who’d gone to pick up the patches had arrived at the station. I didn’t have high hopes about what we’d manage to get from them, but we’d talk to them anyway and see what happened.
“Fingers crossed,” I said.
I recalled what Rashford had said as we headed down, thinking about how these teenagers seemed to stay one step ahead. Jules, if he was the leader behind all of this like we suspected, was certainly not to be underestimated. I shouldn’t have even considered that he might turn up to fetch the patches because he wouldn’t get his hands dirty like that.
And that was the core of the problem. To bring him in, we needed to catch him in the act, but so far, he was eluding us.
Fourteen
The next day rolled in as bright and hot as it’d been for weeks. It was the worst possible weather for sitting inside an office that had been egged in the night, the yolks splattered across the windows, congealed and slimy.
“Yeah, they don’t like us,” Stephen said as he turned up, a hand over his nose. All the windows had been closed, but the rotten smell still lingered.
“Do you think this is because of those kids we talked to yesterday?”
“Or because we seized the patches, yeah.” He sighed and dropped into his chair before turning to give me a grin. “Hey, at least now we can say whether it really is hot enough outside to cook an egg.”
“I really don’t care.” I rolled my eyes.
“But they’ve sent us a free lunch,” he teased, tipping his head towards the window. “I mean, if you grab it before the window cleaners arrive.”
“You’re disgusting,” I told him but couldn’t completely keep a smile off my face.
On my decision, we’d tried to get information from the teenagers brought in yesterday, but I hadn’t asked them to continue to report back to us. We spoke to their parents, so maybe they wouldn’t return to the gang at all, but that was possibly a vain hope, especially considering what the kids had done to the station in the night.
“I’d rather they covered Hewford in eggs than burned anything, at least,” I sighed. The smell in the air was making me feel vaguely nauseous, and I brought my coffee up to my face to breathe that in instead.
“True,” Stephen said seriously. “Better they throw eggs at us all summer than toss matches around.”
“I called security already to ask that they send over the CCTV from last night. If we could at least confirm that it was the teenagers, that’ll be another point against the group, even if we can’t identify their faces.”
“Judging from how you’re just complaining about the eggs and drinking coffee, I’m guessing the CCTV hasn’t arrived yet?”
“You’d be right.”
I took another sip of the iced coffee Sam had made. It was much sweeter than my usual black coffee, but the coolness was refreshing, and I was having to stop myself from drinking it too fast.
While we were waiting for security to contact us, I looked over my notes from the teens’ interviews last night. They’d had very little to say to us, other than protesting their innocence and calling us names. I’d tried offering them leniency as I’d done with Mickey, but one had clammed up and refused to say anything, while the other sneered at us and proudly said that he wasn’t a snitch.
The security team came through with the footage not long later, and Stephen and I split it between us. I took the first half of the night, and he took the second, both of us searching efficiently through it to find what we were looking for.
“Here we are,” I said a short while later.
At one AM, a group of six teens became visible on the cameras, carrying egg boxes as they ran across the car park after getting over the outer wall.
“There’s barbed wire on that wall. I’m surprised they didn’t cut themselves to pieces,” Stephen
said, and I hummed in agreement.
The teens proceeded to lob the eggs at Hewford, celebrating on camera when they made a good shot. I just sighed. As incidents went, this was a relatively mild one, but I was sure Rashford would be incensed to hear about it. It was another example of Hewford getting embarrassed by a bunch of kids.
I paused and replayed the video as I tried to get a good view of the teens’ faces. They were all wearing hoods, but the nature of throwing eggs at the building required them to tilt their heads back, conveniently giving us a decent picture of their faces.
“I don’t recognise any of them.” Stephen frowned at the slightly grainy pictures, his lips pressed together.
“Oh Christ,” I muttered when I zoomed in on the last of the group.
“What?”
“You sure you don’t recognise any of them?” I said, pointing at the shortest of the teenagers. He peered forwards and stared.
“Damn, that’s Alistair Pumphrey.”
“Aye, I’m ninety per cent sure it is.”
I rubbed a hand over my clammy forehead and, after digesting the information for a moment, I sent off an email to Sedgwick. It was good news, overall, that Alistair was alive and well and not being held somewhere against his will. Less positive was the fact that he was apparently choosing to run around with the gang, doing things like egging police stations.
I clicked my fingers as a thought came to me all at once.
“I knew I recognised him!”
“Who?”
I fumbled through the CCTV files I had saved on my computer, which was a lot these days, and dug up the one I wanted. It showed the teenage gang walking along as they left the elderly couple’s house where they’d done so much damage. There, next to Jules, was a short teen I’d thought was familiar at the time but hadn’t been able to place.
“There he is. Alistair. He’s been running with the gang since the start.”
“Crikey,” Stephen murmured. “So his dad was right then, in a way. Jules did have something to do with the kid’s disappearance, in that he lured him off into this group.”
“I guess so. Now we need to find out where they’re based, right? Alistair’s got to be living somewhere, and presumably, he’s not on the streets.”
“An abandoned building? Or with one of the other teenagers, maybe?”
“Aye, he could be bouncing between sofas,” I agreed. “Alright, this is a good start.”
Sedgwick came over not long after, wanting to see the footage for himself and interrogate us for answers we didn’t yet have. Eventually, though, he was satisfied that the kid on the CCTV was Alistair and grudgingly thanked us for letting him know before he headed off again.
“He’ll need to let the parents know,” I said, watching Sedgwick walk away.
“That’ll be a difficult one,” Stephen said. “I mean, as a dad, I’d be so relieved my kid was alright, but also so damn pissed that they’d gotten themselves tangled up in this and left me worrying.”
“He might’ve been pushed into it or peer pressured,” I said. “He’s only fourteen, remember. I hope his parents don’t blame him too badly.”
“He needs to be found and brought home, that’s for sure.”
We continued to search through the CCTV as the sun heated up outside, worsening the smell of eggs until the window cleaners arrived to scrub them clean. Stephen and I worked to identify the kids on the video, matching them up with other security footage we’d seen or faces I remembered from that time the older group of teenagers had threatened me.
Nothing urgent came through, and my calls to chase up results from the jerry can that had gone to the labs came up empty. They’d been too busy to look it over yet, they said, and the story was the same with Keira when I tried to ask her about the messaging site.
“It’s a plateau,” Stephen said firmly at lunchtime. I’d just sighed aloud for a third time over today’s stagnancy. “Most cases have a slow period, y’know, when we understand a lot but can’t act on it yet.”
“You’re right, I know. It’s this feeling of waiting for another call, another incident, another fire that gets to me. It niggles at you, keeps you awake at night.”
“I know the feeling, mate. It won’t last forever.” Stephen reached over to rub my shoulder. “And not getting enough sleep doesn’t help the case.”
“Aye, try telling my brain that.” I shook my head. “Running helps, though. If I tire myself out properly, I can’t overthink anything.”
“Not sure that’s the healthiest attitude if I’m honest, but it’s better than alcohol or sleeping pills, so…” Stephen sent me a dry smile and a shrug.
“Thanks a bunch,” I grinned back, gently cuffing the back of his head. “If I start self-medicating with whisky, I’ll let you know.”
“Yeah, you do that,” Stephen said. He was still smiling slightly, but there was a seriousness in his eyes as he added, “I mean it, if things get worse and you can’t sleep or whatever, you’ll tell me, won’t you? None of this stoic, macho bull-”
“Aye,” I said, with a laugh that was more surprised than from any genuine humour. “O’course. And I expect the same from you, big man. You know I’ll listen to your troubles any day.”
“Yeah?” he said, the teasing look back in his eyes. “Well, I have been having awful pain in my feet. You could give ‘em a good foot rub-”
I swore at him with a laugh, and we carried on bickering as we finished our lunches. The day wore on, hot and slow, and I found myself looking forward to my run and, of course, to seeing Sam again when I went back to hers. We’d been planning to try cooking something different this evening and working up an appetite with a long run beforehand sounded like a good idea.
“You might as well head off, too, Mitch,” Stephen said as he was preparing to leave at five. “There’s nowt else to be getting on with that can’t wait till tomorrow.”
“There’s still-”
“You’re about bouncing in your seat, mate, seriously. Go on your run. You’ll be fresh for tomorrow.”
“Christ, you’re such a dad, y’know that?”
“I’m taking that as a compliment.” He grinned at me when I rolled my eyes and headed off home to his wife and kids.
I tried to carry on working for another ten minutes or so, but Stephen was right. I had too much energy to focus right now.
Running across the station car park and breaking out onto the pavements outside felt like a relief, and not just because of the oppressive heat of Hewford’s stout walls and the unpleasant smell of egg that’d lingered all day.
The streets were relatively quiet, and I stretched out my stride, taking it fairly leisurely since I was planning to spend a couple of hours running if I could. There was certainly enough daylight, and I’d sent Sam a text so that she’d know to expect me later.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of summer, it was true, but evenings like this when the city seemed to slow down, the breeze was pleasantly Mediterranean, and the daylight seemed to stretch out for a week, it was hard not to love it a little bit. I’d have preferred to be up in the moors to appreciate the golden light rather than within the stone walls of the city, it was true, but it was beautiful from down here too. York was picturesque enough that even a country bumpkin like me could appreciate it.
I ran on, taking the same route I’d run recently whenever I was craving stretching out my legs and pushing myself. It took me past the site of the first fire I’d seen, of the disused building out near Vangarde shopping centre, and I glanced at it as I ran past. It looked charred, diminished, and unimportant now, and I doubted that those driving past would even notice it. It occurred to me to think that that same fire, which seemed like nothing particularly serious at the time, had proved to have been the start of a dangerous, escalating pattern, and we still didn’t know how it would end.
Cutting back towards the city an hour or so later, I began the stretch back towards Sam’s place. Despite spending so much time at hers, I could h
onestly say I didn’t miss my flat. I bought it because it was reasonably cheap, well-located, and available when I needed it, not because I’d fallen in love with how it looked. I’d never really made it my own, whereas Sam had turned her house into something much more personal. With me staying over there, my clothes had started ending up in her drawers, my books and DVDs on her shelves.
Before she’d dropped her bombshell about moving to Kent, I’d been starting to think about asking her whether she’d want to move in together, but that was off the cards now. The thought of her selling her place sent a pang of melancholy through me before I pushed it away. I couldn’t change the situation and had no desire to talk Sam out of it when I knew how much she wanted to give it a shot, so there was no point dwelling on it.
The evening light dimmed as I ran along the city streets towards her house, though there was still a couple of hours of daylight left at least. I was thinking about Sam and me eating dinner outside when a movement off to my left made me startle, and I looked sharply sideways.
Up ahead, no more than ten yards away, a figure had just come out from a side road, and two more followed him out. He was hooded, but I got the impression of youthfulness from all of them, from their lanky limbs and the way they were dressed.
Instinctual unease made me slow even though there was no immediate reason to suggest that I should. Later, I would wonder whether I should’ve pushed on, sprinting forwards, but at the time, I didn’t have the chance to think it through. A second later, another three people came walking towards me on my side of the road, wearing the same hoodies and jeans as the others.
I was definitely feeling trapped, and I twisted around to glance behind me, slowing to a walk as I did so. Walking up the middle of the road behind me was a tall teenager with his hood up, but the flash of blond hair at his brow was unmistakable, even in the soft light of the evening. It was Jules.
Glancing at the boy at his side, I recognised Alistair Pumphrey immediately. The kid’s face was lodged in my memory, and he was easily the shortest of the group. Until now, I’d been thinking of him as a victim, but watching him walk alongside Jules while the three groups of teenagers were closing in on me made me reevaluate him as being firmly on their side.
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